Letter Never Sent

I voted today and the whole thing pissed me off. The only sense of certainty I possessed was in voting against the commuter rail business. I’m typically unsupportive of any kind of large public expenditure, and especially so if it mainly benefits people in Leander. A train from Leander to downtown Austin seems idiotic.

I’m also very tired of people trying to convince me of their various points of view. I now realize how completely obnoxious I must have been back in 2000 when I tried to convert as many people as possible to my own viewpoint, completely convinced I had it all figured out. In day to day matters of politics and religion, I try to keep most of my opinions to myself. If I’ve changed in any way in the past four years, it’s in the sense that I really don’t trust certainty or the opinions of anyone else, even close friends or family. I take in everything that people say and do, then I make up my own mind. If a person’s mind can be changed by one debate or argument, or if they can be swayed by one impassioned appeal for their support, I find that suspicious. It’s the opposite of close-mindedness.

Did anyone else see John Kerry and John Edwards on “60 Minutes” last night? I thought they did a great job together, and showed a lot of good team work when handling some of the pointed questions Leslie Stahl threw out them. When asking about a criticism levelled by Bush toward Kerry, John Edwards jumped out to his defense allowing John Kerry to appear to take the high ground.

I think maintaining the approach of optimism and reserve will help them with the Republicans. Judging from last night, I think they will do a good job of fighting in the election.

Despite my black and white interpretation events in Iraq, there is a lot more nuance here, and it makes it difficult to really understand what exactly is happening. Here is some additional context to what is happening from people who spend their time studying the complexities of the situation there. Juan Cole * Informed Comment * blog

I personally don’t see what all the controversy is about with the Mel Gibson film, The Passion. Apparently, there is a line from the bible that Jewish ‘leaders’ object to since it insinuates blame for the death of Jesus on his fellow Jews as collaborators with the Romans:

Mel Gibson has cut a line from his new film The Passion of Christ, in an apparent concession to Jewish lobby groups who have accused him of stoking anti-Semitism and reviving the old accusation that Jews bear collective responsibility for killing the Son of God.

A friend of the actor-director said the final version will not include a line from St Matthew’s gospel in which the Jewish high priest Caiaphas says of the crucifixion: “His blood be on us and on our children.”
…

Gibson has apparently inflicted further damage with an interview in Reader’s Digest, in which he was challenged to acknowledge the Holocaust happened. Gibson responded: “I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives.”

Gibson’s choice of words has incensed Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who wrote in a letter to the actor-director: “To describe Jewish suffering during the Holocaust as ‘some of them were Jews in concentration camps’ is an afterthought that feeds into the hands of Holocaust deniers and revisionists.”

I don’t think any one group reserves special status for the atrocity of World War Two. After all, 15-20 million Chinese were killed, 15-20 Soviet Russians, millions of Japanese, and untold other Europeans, Americans, and Japanese, etc. This in addition to the six million Jews, six million Slavs, and the countless other Gypsies, homosexuals, and those others found unsuitable to the Nazi government. I do think that the Jewish Holocaust receives the most attention at the expense of the other victims. I understand that the Jews were targetted for extermination by the Nazis and I am sensitive to that, but to me, being so vigilant against perceived threats to the Jewish community betrays a type of cultural nationalism. It calls into question fundamental questions of race, ethnicity, and identity.

Looks like UT is set to bid to run Los Alamos laboratories. That should be interesting.